[Buddha-l] Linden dollars for Buddha?

[Richard Hayes]

On Saturday 30 December 2006 08:42, Michael J. Wilson wrote:

> I registered in the Second Life virtual reality community yesterday.

The virtual community here at buddha-l sends its virtual condolences.

> I thought  this is how Buddha-l will look in the future. 

Not if Amitabha and I have anything to do with it. We like buddha-l pretty 
much as it is. One thing that concerns me slightly is that the address of 
buddha-l is now in some huge database of addresses that spammers have access 
to. None of the spam that is sent to buddha-l finds its way out to the 
coddled readership, but the poor moderators are looking for new recipes for 
spam. Jim Peavler likes to cut Spam up into 1 kilogram chunks, soak it in 
egg, beer and flour batter, deep fry it with a few battered Mars bars, and 
put it into a deep-fried loaf of Italian bread. It makes a tasty sandwich but 
I think Jim's recipe is a hell of a waste of beer. But I digress, as is my 
wont.

> Could this be a future for academic online meeting spaces? 

It is the present of academic classrooms. Increasingly I find myself lecturing 
to the lids of open laptops, behind which students are reading their e-mail, 
checking out photographs of Miss USA french-kissing Donald Trump's wife, 
buying and selling stocks, downloading mpeg documentaries proving that 
America has been governed by robots since 1957, and booking cheap flights to 
Bogata. The really serious students (both of them) are reading Wikipedia 
articles as I talk and yelling out my mistakes---things like "Hume died in 
1776. You said 1775!" In the rare event that anyone actually wants to ask a 
question, such as "Is there going to be a surprise quiz next Monday?" (the 
only kind of information they cannot find on Google or Ask.com or 
Clusty.com), I tell them to send me a text message. (I neglect to add that I 
don't have a mobile phone or a Blackberry. I'm so old-fashioned that I still 
think of blackberries as something you put on waffles.) I've seen the 
present, and I don't want to live there.

>  I have been on and off
> buddha-l since 1993 and not much has changed to the interface as it could
> still be read by a DOS user with a 1200 baud modem.

May this never change. I reckon if somebody is using high-speed internet 
connections and Windows (or the X-11 system in Linux), they are probably 
suffering from attention deficiency disorder and moving way too fast to be 
able to savor the morsels of subtle wisdom that our team of self-appointed 
spiritual masters are preparing for their delectation. People who use mice 
and menus instead of command lines need a doctor, not buddha-l. No, buddha-l 
is for slowpokes. In fact, Jim Peavler and I have been exploring the 
possibility of distributing messages by postcard and doing away with all 
these modems and computers. 

I've been reading a lot of Emerson and William James and Rufus M. Jones this 
past year. They all wrote beautiful sentences in long, meandering essays that 
take a whole afternoon to read. On a snowy winter evening, reading a bunch of 
ungrammatical buddha-l messages, each no longer than a badly written 
telegraph message, is no substitute for curling up next to the fireplace with 
a cup of hot Xocolatl, a purring cat, and a tattered copy of 
Emerson's "Representative Men." If some modern Emersonian were to send a 
well-crafted essay to buddha-l, it would be received with a barrage of 
whimpering complaints about prolixity, and a stern reprimand from Benito 
about speech precepts. Alas, we live in a post-literary (nd increasingly 
post-literate) era. As Swami Vivekananda predicted would happen, we are now 
living in the age of the shudra.

The Buddha would have hated computers. Of this I am convinced. He didn'teven 
like reality much---howmuch less virtual reality. It dishonours the memory of 
the Best of all Bipeds to write about him by e-mail. Let's shut this damn 
thing down and start writing each other long letters with fountain pens and 
endlessly fascinating stationery.

Thanks, Mr Wilson, for a thought-provoking message.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico